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Facts you may not know about PewDiePie

When PewDiePie visited The Late Show, Stephen Colbert said, "I want to thank the internet for allowing their emperor to be here this evening." It was obviously an exaggeration for comedic effect, but if we had to elect an internet leader, PewDiePie—a.k.a. Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg—would certainly be in the running. The 26-year-old Swedish native claims more than 47 million followers on his YouTube channel (the next closest channel has 28 million), making him basically the LeBron James, Katie Ledecky, and Tom Brady of YouTube. While even your grandparents have probably heard the name PewDiePie, how many people really know his story? Here are the gritty details behind YouTube's happiest superstar.
Forgot his original YouTube channel login
One of the first questions people inevitably ask after learning about PewDiePie is what the hell his name means. Turns out, it doesn't really mean anything. The first part "Pew" is the sound a laser makes, or as Colbert put it, "That's the sound of someone who can't make a laser sound." "Die" is, ya know, die. PewDie is what Kjellberg named his first YouTube channel, which he launched in December of 2006. Somewhere along the way, however, he forgot the login information, and he needed to start another one in 2010. Instead of PewDie2, he added "Pie," because the man really loves pie.

Someone at YouTube must have helped Kjellberg recover his original login information, because the oldest video uploaded to PewDie is from 2012—well after he started the PewDiePie channel—and he refers to himself in the vido as "PewDiePie." The original channel has more than 440,000 subscribers and 14 videos, with the most recent (about spammers trying to impersonate PewDiePie in YouTube comments) uploaded on May 25, 2013.
Financial analysts say PewDiePie is underpaid

$7.4 million seems like a lot of money to a college dropout. Hell, $7.4 million seems like a ton of money for 99% of the world. But according to some analysts, it's nowhere near what Kjellberg should be earning per year. Let's get into some math now (we swear it's interesting, so don't glaze over like you would in algebra class).

Michael Thomason of Forbes wrote, "Ad analytics firm Emarketer estimated YouTube would earn $5.6 billion from ad revenue in 2013, about two-thirds of the $8.5 billion CBS earned from ad revenue for its network television business." CBS's highest-rated show during that year was The Big Bang Theory, with an average of 18.7 million viewers per week. That's less than half of PewDiePie's subscriber base. Experts estimate that CBS roughly earned $6.5 million per week on advertising revenue from that sitcom alone, which means in one week, CBS earned nearly as much as Kjellberg did in one year. Popular YouTube creators seem like they earn a lot of money for just goofing around on camera, but it's only an extremely small percentage of what YouTube makes.

Facts you may not know about PewDiePie
Reviewed by Deepak Yadav
on
02:30:00
Rating: 5